In 2025, the 150th anniversary of the death of the artist Jean-François Millet (4/10/1814 – 20/1/1875) will take place and will be celebrated between Summer and Autumn at the National Gallery in London.
After at least fifty years since the last exhibition in a museum, “Millet: Life on the Land” presents thirteen works, divided between drawings and paintings, from British public collections with the work Angelus from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. To complete, two drawings of shepherdesses from the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the Cooper Gallery (Barnsley) will be brought together for the first time.
The rural images of workers from the village of Barbizon where he lived until his last years in Paris, will characterize the time period of Millet’s work.
A dignity, a historicization but also a soul to that world of agricultural work made of hardships, labors, beliefs, satisfactions and importance that Francois Millet believed in in his pictorial career, becoming connotant of a figurative expressive style.
Millet: Life on the Land
7 August – 19 October 2025
The National Gallery, London
Room 1
Admission free
Jean-François Millet was born in Grouchy (Manche) and was a pupil of Paul Delaroche in Paris by 1837. For some years he painted mainly idylls in imitation of 18th-century French painters. Becoming, like Honoré Daumier, increasingly moved by the spectacle of social injustice, Millet turned to peasant subjects and won his first popular success at the Salon of 1848 with The Winnower. From the following year he was mainly active at Barbizon and associated with the Barbizon school of landscape painters. His work was influenced by Dutch paintings of the 17th century and by the work of Jean-Siméon Chardin and was influential in Holland on Jozef Israëls and on the early style of Vincent Van Gogh. Millet died in Barbizon 20/1/1875.
About Barbizon school: made by painters were part of an art movement toward Realism in art, which rose in the context of the dominant Romantic Movement of the time. The Barbizon school was active roughly from 1830 through 1870. It takes its name from the village of Barbizon, France, on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, where many of the artists gathered. Most of their works were landscape painting, but several of them also painted landscapes with farmworkers, and genre scenes of village life. Some of the most prominent features of this school are its tonal qualities, colour, loose brushwork, and softness of form. The leaders of the Barbizon school were: Théodore Rousseau, Charles-François Daubigny, Jules Dupré, Constant Troyon, Charles Jacque, and Narcisse Virgilio Díaz. Jean-François Millet lived in Barbizon from 1849, but his interest in figures with a landscape backdrop sets him rather apart from the others.
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